Kate Tempest
After taking their bows together, she and Clare Uchima leave the stage, and an audience that has just given them the biggest, most rapturous, ovation that I can ever remember hearing at the LCR.
It seems that the mere mention of Kate Tempest's name can create a stark division of opinion. Earlier this week a Norwich musician, whose judgement I respect enormously, posted a Facebook comment that stated, simply, 'Kate Tempest. I just don't get it'. The resultant thread appeared divided fairly evenly between those who adored her work and those who had absolutely no time for it – one commentator describing her 'on-stage passion' as 'breathtaking', another likening her spoken word performances to 'shouting shit year-nine poetry'.
Well I, along with 1500 other 'My Mate Marmites', nailed my colours firmly to the mast of the Nick Rayns LCR last night, and opted for the Book of Traps and Lessons. And I sincerely believe I made the right decision. Rather than suffer the ritual indignation of watching the local football team lose 0-2 to Watford, or freezing on a cold street corner whilst the council bolstered the air pollution levels with several thousand pounds worth of gunpowder, magnesium and strontium fumes, I opted for Kate Tempest's own incendiary performance which, for me, almost bordered on the messianic.
It started with some of that 'shouty' hip-hop stuff from her first two albums, though opening with the chillingly compulsive Europe Is Lost, from her 2016 Mercury-nominated call-to-action Let Them Eat Chaos. There is no live band – all synths and beats are generated on-stage by Clare Uchima's pulsating score. Tempest, dressed in black, but with golden locks intermittently kissed by spotlights and strobes that dance across the stage, prowls with ferocious intent, her words rising in a crescendo of anger and frustration until, without warning, she switches into We Die - “We die so the others can be born” she muses, “the point of life is live, love, if you can, then pass it on”.
We steam through more tracks from LTEC, and its predecessor Everybody Down, and you begin to understand why some sceptics don't get Kate Tempest. With her relentless arsenal of rhyme, the hip-hop beat and the rapped delivery, it is rather easy to ask if Tempest is 'for real'? But listen to the lyrics, marvel at the lexicologic prowess, consider her passionate questionings, and I think you should find the answer.
Without any form of break, or prior introduction, we move straight from Tunnel Vision into The Book of Traps and Lessons, a complete opus of work that is collectively one part observation, one part manifesto, and one part quasi-religious experience. The mood has changed, the sound and rhythm has assumed an atmospheric and, at times, almost mystical dimension. The delivery of the lyrics relies less on rhyme, is less beat-orientated, and becomes more free-flowing and prosaic. There are moments when Tempest's phraseology assumes an almost evangelic dimension, constructing crescendos in the way that politicians build their audience towards calculated outbreaks of cheering and applause. Yet Tempest is not in the business of manipulating her audience, she has too much to say to pause and savour any whooping and whistling of concurrence.
During the powerful and moving Hold Your Own we are reduced to almost cathedralic silence and uniformly assume a reverential placidity. The performance concludes, as does the album, with People's Faces, as much a call to action as it is a plea for love and understanding - “There is so much peace, to be found, in people's faces”
There is no encore. “I have said everything that I came here to say. Please take some of this wonderful energy away with you tonight”, Tempest explains. After taking their bows together, she and Clare Uchima leave the stage, and an audience that has just given them the biggest, most rapturous, ovation that I can ever remember hearing at the LCR.
You really had to be there.
